First, coronavirus and the flu are more like comparing trains and sedans. They're respiratory diseases but the underlying cause is different.

Second, what people generally think of as the flu is really food poisoning. They think of it as throwing up and aching and a relatively common and benign illness.

The flu doesn't hospitalize 5% to 20% of the people who get it.

Comparing it to something that rolls through every year and has been mitigated as much as it can through vaccines is different than something that spreads faster, is roughly 10x more likely to kill you, that no one is immune to, that has no known medicine that can cure it, and there's no vaccine that can slow the spread.

The only way the flu/coronavirus comparison works is if you use it in the context that coronavirus is more deadly and has the potential to kill more people as it spreads globally.